Do particle verbs share a representation with their root verbs? Evidence from structural priming

Abstract

Many languages have particle verbs like meegeven in Dutch, in which a particle (“mee”, with) sometimes appears independently from the root verb (“geven”, give). To investigate whether particle verbs and their root verbs share a lexical-syntactic (lemma) representation, we tested whether structural priming (the tendency for speakers to repeat sentence structure) is boosted by lexical overlap between prime and target verbs. Priming was larger with repetition of the identical verb than with root-only repetition and larger with particle-only repetition than without lexical repetition. These findings support a dual-lemma representation for particle verbs: one lemma represents the verb-particle combination (separately from the root), another lemma represents the particle (shared with other particle verbs). Finally, priming was larger from root to particle verb than between two different particle verbs with identical roots, suggesting that particle-verb lemmas are connected to their root-verb lemmas but not to each other.